The Nesakwatch Enchainment: My Intro to Alpine Climbing
- Greg Luesink
- Sep 25, 2022
- 5 min read
Updated: Mar 26
Written November, 2024
TLDR: Ben and I set out to do an "enchainment" in our backyard: a triple spire traverse in the Chilliwack River Valley. While I'd done plenty of climbing in the years prior, this was my first proper alpine climbing trip - and man alive did it ever deliver!
Ben had already done this traverse, using the North ridge of the North Spire to start. This time, he suggested that we adapt the traverse by climbing the Southwest Ridge of the North Nesakwatch Spire, rated at 5.8+ in difficulty.
We'd had an incredible summer of adventures already, climbing The Goat multipitch, summiting Slesse Peak, and traversing the entire Cheam Range. Suffice to say, we could have stopped there and called it an awesome season. But, weather continued to be dry and sunny, so we just kept getting after it!
In the first semester of my final year of my Bachelor's of Kinesiology degree, I was still itching to get into the alpine. Rather than studying, Ben's suggestion of climbing some spires easily overruled my need to study.
I set my alarm for 2:45 am on a Saturday, and awoke to get picked up by Ben shortly after. We drove to the shared trailhead for Rexford and Slesse Memorial. Just before we arrived, we were stopped by some bozos who set up their tent in the middle of the road. Ben got out to wake them as we were still a few clicks from the actual trailhead. They muttered an excuse about their car and said they were going to climb Slesse's NE Buttress.
The Approach
We began the hike just after 4 am in the pitch dark, and blasted our way up into the alpine through the cool night air. We reached the boulder field in just over two hours, just as the dawn began. Please note that, since I am writing this in 2024, I was able to use a photo from 2023 to draw our route!
North Nesakwatch Spire - 5.8+
While we are similar calibre climbers, Ben was more experienced in the alpine, so he offered to lead the first pitch. Citing that he remembered it being one of the easier sections, he racked up with all the cams, nuts, and alpine-draws that we brought to climb. Quite quickly, we both realized that it was much trickier than anticipated. Ben hummed and hawed, climbing up and then retreating. It was quite exposed climbing and the moves were traversing, which would lead to a nasty swing if he fell. But, Ben prevailed, committing to the moves and climbing upwards through the difficult start. Soon, he was belaying me up to him. I found the moves much less intimidating thanks to being on top rope!
We exchanged leading pitches for the remaining 5 pitches to the summit of the North spire. There was some really funky terrain, and it was quite chilly in the early morning, shaded in the giant granite blocks. I led pitch two, which included a perfectly split finger-size crack. I built a belay station in a notch, and Ben led pitch 3. The next few pitches were rather unremarkable, and led to a small plateau. This provided a bit of a break from verticality, immediately followed by the highlight climbing of the entire day! Stemming and hand jamming, transferring over to another crack system, and upwards in acrobatic fashion. It was very fluid climbing with good gear and a clean line, and remains one of my favourite pitches to date! We found ourselves scrambling up the remaining metres to summit at 1 pm - 5.5 hours after starting the climb, and 9 hours after leaving the car.
South Nesakwatch Spire - 5.7
We started the scrambling off of the North Spire, and quickly arrived at the saddle between the spires. Here, I took a look up at the craziest looking summit pinnacle I'd ever laid eyes on - a leaning boulder propped on top of the South spire.
Are we going to climb that??
Ben smiled and nodded, and we continued navigating through the boulders. We were able to scramble quite a ways up, but eventually decided to pull out the rope as a precaution.
There's not much to write about for this section, other than we did 3 pitches of climbing, including the final summit block. The first two pitches were quite easy, so we just climbed in our boots on and around the flakes and pillars of rock. It was somewhat awkward with our big packs on, but we squirmed our way to the base of the summit tower.
I was up for leading the summit block, an awful 5.7 off-width. We didn't have any gear large enough to protect the section, so I soloed up it, fighting with all my might to not fall out of the leg-sized crack. After a few metres, I was standing on top of the block and belayed Ben up to me. We set up a rappel and lowered one after the other back to the small sub-summit plateau. It was nearly 3 pm at this point, only 2 hours since leaving the north spire. Not bad! We ate some food and looked ahead at our possible route up Rexford's north aspect. But first, we needed to rappel into the notch between South Nesakwatch Spire and Mt. Rexford.
Mt Rexford - ~5.6
Ben was quite confident that we could scramble all but the last pitch of Mt Rexford from the notch. As we started up, I quickly got out of my comfort zone and requested that we rope up. Thankfully, the climbing wasn't too hard, but there was a significant depreciation in rock quality compared to what we had just been climbing. As opposed to solid blocks of granite, we were on dirty, loose, red-rock for the next two pitches. We arrived at the triple-bump plateau and traversed to the Eastern-most rock pile for the "true" summit. I led the short chimney pitch to gain the summit and we shared some amazing views of the surrounding Cascades and Chilliwack mountains.
We did one rappel back to our bags, and proceeded to do another 3 rappels to get back to the notch below the south spire. Rather than chance a complicated and time-consuming descent following the unknown-to-us West ridge, we opted to descend the dirty gully down to the boulder field. As we went down, we were treated with phenomenal sunset views! We crossed the boulder field and got back to the trail just in time before the sun completely faded. We descended in the dark, just as we did on the way up.
Slesse, basking in the setting sunlight
In total, over 17 hours from car to car, we climbed 12 pitches and did 6 rappels, linking three summits together in a memorable enchainment. Ben and I got to push our limits of what we could accomplish in a day yet again, and I found new joy in technical alpine climbing. Immediately, I wanted to do more! What else was out there that could be climbed?
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